Paul Krugman in The New York Times piece Things Could Be Worse explains how bad it is in Japan.  Yet our Republicans could make our economy even worse than that.

It’s hard to overstate how destructive the economic ideas offered earlier this week by John Boehner, the House minority leader, would be if put into practice. Basically, he proposes two things: large tax cuts for the wealthy that would increase the budget deficit while doing little to support the economy, and sharp spending cuts that would depress the economy while doing little to improve budget prospects. Fewer jobs and bigger deficits — the perfect combination.

Mary Pitt in her post With Friends Like These takes progressives to task for their constant whining.

The very same people who elected this man and, in addition, gave him a predominantly Democratic Congress to assist him in his task, are the ones who are sitting on their haunches and wailing like a pack of forlorn hound dogs. “He set the wrong priorities!” “He isn’t doing enough!” “He isn’t doing it fast enough!” “He’s a failure!” These are not the words from the opposition. They are the words of his supporters!

And the money quote that gave me the headline:

It’s time to put on our Big Boy pants, roll up our sleeves and get out the vote for Our Side

Eugene Robinson latest column is Haley Barbour’s Ridiculous Story.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I’ve ever heard. Ever.

He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can’t decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.

In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and website, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed that it was “my generation” that led the switch: “my generation, who went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college—never thought twice about it.”

The “old Democrats” fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour said, but “by my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn’t gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.”

Not a word of this is true. [Emphasis added by me.]

I know a few people who are old enough to know better, but who would probably fall for Barbour’s story.  Then we have the people who are too young to know better.

I am one who is old enough to know better.  I appreciate Eugene Robinson’s laying out the time line to make it perfectly clear what a load of bull Barbour’s claims are. Without this reminder even I might be tempted to give Barbour credit for one or two words of truth in his perverted story.

If the mainstream media actually start selling this revisionism, then you know the world has gone mad.  Faux Noise doesn’t count because you know this propaganda is right up their alley.

Now for something to really cheer you up.

If you want to avoid the commercial, use this link instead of clicking on the video below

I hope you didn’t fall for my opening line. This is Nouriel Roubini after all. So what did you really expect?

The President’s Labor Day speech in Milwaukee is mow on C-SPAN.

The C-SPAN web site describes the speech wiht the following words:

Pres. Obama announced a new plan for improving the nation’s infrastructure and creating jobs during his appearance at the annual Laborfest event in Milwaukee. The initiative would spend $50 billion over the next six years, to repair 150,000 miles of highways and to build a smart air traffic control system, among other transportation-related projects.

You can read the written version of the President’s prepared remarks on the Whitehouse web site.

If anybody can turn things around by the November elections, this is the President who can.  We can help.  Yes we can.

Paul Krugman’s column in today’s The New York Times is titled 1938 in 2010. He compares that time, 5 years into Roosevelt’s administration, to the current time, 2 years into the Obama administration.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out.

Obama’s mistake was thinking that if the stimulus proved to be too small, he could always ask for more.  Politics being what it is he should have asked for a stimulus that was so big, it had a safety margin in it.  Later, if the whole stimulus package was not needed, he could have stopped the parts that hadn’t been spent yet.

Comparing attitudes of the public now and then, Krugman says:

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

I just got into a discussion on a purportedly progressive web site where people were wishing that Obama could be more like FDR. This is not what they had in mind, of course. I guess it really is true that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it.

Read the comment posted on truthdig.com by cruxpuppy to see how people pine for a history about FDR that never was.  I tried to straighten him out with a comment that pointed to the Krugman piece. On Fenruary 08, 2014 I disabled the two previous links because of a warning I received about them.

Robert B. Reich has written a column How to End the Great Recession that should send the Republicans right over the edge.

In a way, this justifies the need to redeploy the money from the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy into more productive stimulus of the economy.

However, it will have the Republicans saying, “See, we told you they all had an evil motive.”

Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that’s good for everyone. The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That’s the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we’ll be stuck in the Great Recession.

The evil side of redistribution of wealth rears its ugly head.  You see, good redistribution of wealth only goes one way according to Republicans.  It only goes from the poor to the rich.

What about the not so rich members of the Republican Tea Party?  They have hopes of being rich someday, so they don’t want to go back to the days of equitable distribution.  Based on their hope for the future, they are willing to give up their rewards in the present.  Sounds almost religious, doesn’t it?

Do tax cuts for the wealthy stimulate the economy?  Sure they do, but not as effectively as direct investment in research and development, education and retraining workers, and infrastructure repair and replacement.

The plan is not just to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but it is to replace them with something more effective.  In other words, redeploy the Bush tax cuts to something more effective.  What Democrat would be afraid to support such a plan?

As long as the Democrats allow the Republicans to cast the debate as to whether or not tax cuts for the wealthy stimulate the economy, then the Democrats are on the losing side of the debate.

The real debate is whether or not we can find a better stimulus than the tax cuts to the wealthy.  The Democrats have a plan, but the Republicans do not.

Don’t dismiss retraining because you think all the good jobs are outsourced already.  Even the PBS Nightly Business Report had a feature on how a business wanted to expand but they could not find qualified operators for their new robotics production equipment.  They said that their staff was too small to spare anybody to train a new employee.  What a terrific case for the need for government funded training.

2010/09/05 Update

The Dems find themselves in a bind.  They decry the effect on the long term debt of the Bush Tax cuts for the wealthy.  I guess the redeployment of this part of the tax cut can only be able cover the next few years.  Then the stimulus will end and the out lying years we will use the funds to cut the deficit.  The message gets more complicated.

In response to E.J. Dionne, Jr. piece What’s on Obama’s Next Page?, there were various comments adding to the carping about the Obama Presidency.

I explained to the complainers how to solve their problems.

You know how to solve your disappointment with Obama?  Put the Republicans back in office.

They will repeal the health reform act as they have promised.  There won’t be any more stimulus packages from Republicans.  We know they prefer bank bailouts.  The TARP was Bush’s answer to the financial crisis.

Tax cuts for the middle class, sure after they give some more tax cuts for the wealthy.

Repairing crumbling bridges and roads? Naw, that would hinder private enterprise.

Research using embryonic stem cells?  No way.  We’d rather throw away those frozen embryos than discover a cure for Parkinson’s disease.

Increase the number of bank examiners and go after fraudulent bank executives?  What a waste of money.  We know how successful Reagan was in preventing the S&L disaster by refusing to let examiners examine the insolvent S&Ls;.  He cut the examiners budgets and refused to pay them decently or give them computers.  Now that’s the way a Republican carries out his executive responsibilities.

If you don’t like the intelligence reports that had doubts about whether Saddam Hussein had WMDs, then form your own defense intelligence agency to tell you what you already know for sure is the real truth.

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of the Arab speaking intelligence officers.  They might be able to understand what the terrorists are saying, but we can’t have gay people in the military.  It ruins unit cohesion.

These are all policies your friendly Republicans have brought to you.  They will be glad to bring them back.

But wait! There is even more.  This time it will be the Republican Tea Party.  If you thought the old Republicans were extreme, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Almost in answer to my previous rhetorical question Does Keynesian Economics Work In China But Not The USA, Paul Krugman’s column, The Real Story, uses the recent history of our economy to show that it works here too.

He shows that the so called experts who predicted dire consequences from a too large stimulus package were completely wrong.  The actual experts who predicted dire consequences from too small a stimulus were right.

If repeating the same action and expecting different results is called insanity, what we would we call it when the Republicans want to do the opposite action, but expect the same results?

Do we think the behavior of the economy is completely unaffected by government action, and just because one set of experts were right the last time, then they won’t be right the next time?  Apparently the Republicans don’t think the economy is unaffected by government action or they wouldn’t be so adamant in their obstruction.

Do progressives believe that because Obama was only able to get a small stimulus package through that we ought to now turn control back to the Republicans who wanted no stimulus?

I am having a real problem making sense out of either side that seems to blame Obama as the cause of our problems and not the potential solution.